Which USEflags should I use for my portage binhost? I use the desktop profile and I was thinking of adding the 'bluetooth', 'wifi', 'ipod' USEflags. What other flags should be added in order to provide the enduser with binaries that contains all USEflags necessary for desktop usage?

What does this USEflag exactly do? I have looked up it's description but it wasn't very helpful _________________Please add [solved] to the initial post's subject line if you feel your problem is resolved. Help answer the unanswered

(AFAIK there shouldn't be any redistribution problems with those, but correct me if I'm wrong...)
Maybe also nuke 'arts'?
IM protocols:

Code:

msn

(There're a lot of them but since I've never used anything besides msn, I can't really tell which ones would be good to have. Perhaps 'yahoo' and 'aim' will be appreciated by some.)
General:

Code:

usb
samba
java
nsplugin

Thanks! These are useful additions. What do you mean with "Maybe also nuke 'arts'?"._________________Please add [solved] to the initial post's subject line if you feel your problem is resolved. Help answer the unanswered

Because arts is at best not very useful (it doesn't do anything without a kernel sound driver like alsa or oss and everything it can do alsa and oss can do by themselves) and at worst it doesn't work very well anyway.

Because arts is at best not very useful (it doesn't do anything without a kernel sound driver like alsa or oss and everything it can do alsa and oss can do by themselves) and at worst it doesn't work very well anyway.

That is good to know. Added -arts._________________Please add [solved] to the initial post's subject line if you feel your problem is resolved. Help answer the unanswered

Something unimportant btw. Apart from system-wide USE flags in make.conf, are you also going to use a /etc/portage/package.use for dealing with specific packages? As a matter of fact, I was forced to create a package.use file at some point of time because of three reasons. First, I needed certain USE flags for certain packages, while the same USE flags created problems for other. (Example, ldap I guess is useful USE flag, but openssh doesn't require and accept that flag anymore.) Secondly, I sometimes ran into circular dependencies. And third reason is that there are some USE flags that are specific to just one or two packages (out of a system of about 1000 packages say) and felt its not worth adding it to make.conf and make it clumsy and cluttered ._________________Helium Sources || Gentoo Minimal Livecd

Thanks hirakendu for your suggestions. I have always used /etc/portage/package.use in order to keep make.conf as tidy as possible. However now is my goal an entire other one. I would like to build a binhost with binary packages that contain most common USEflags. To inform people which setting I used I want provide them with the make.conf I used for the creation of the binary packages. therefor I choose to keep the USEflags in make.conf only._________________Please add [solved] to the initial post's subject line if you feel your problem is resolved. Help answer the unanswered

I personally don't know what esd use flag should be good for. Esound quite outdated, and you can mix together various sound sources with arts or gstreamer as well.

Good point! I'll add the -esd to make.conf unless someone knows a good reason why it should be included.

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I am really not sure if it's a good idea to mix gnome and kde together. As far as I remember from the Gentoo Handbook, it's recommended to either the one or the other.

I don't remember such a recommendation moreover the Dekstop profile comes with bot the gnome and the kde USEflags, therefor I don't think it's an big issue.

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I'd suggest to add the gimp and scanner flags if you expect people to do graphics work on your machines. If you add gimp, you may also add smp if they will work on DualCore (or Dual PIII ) machines

Added gimp and scanner . If the smp USEflag doesn't give backward compatibility problems I will add it too.

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If there's firewire hardware on the machines to use, you should add ieee1394, and probably also dv and x264

Ah fireware... never thought of that. Thanks again/

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Finally, some desktop users like to strech their display over two monitors, so maybe the xinerama flag should also be added

Xinerame is already included

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But you're really doing a difficult job. So much depends on what users you have and on what hardware they have (nvidia, e.g.), and on what they will want to do.

Fortunately a recompile with the USEflags you prefer is only one command away, try that in other (binary) distro's.... _________________Please add [solved] to the initial post's subject line if you feel your problem is resolved. Help answer the unanswered

Fortunately a recompile with the USEflags you prefer is only one command away, try that in other (binary) distro's....

I think this is worth remembering. Having a set of common binaries is really appreciated, and if you need to customize it, Gentoo has powerful options to do so..

And the set of common binaries is exactly I try to determine with the help of the community in this thread . You can also take a look at my stage4 project .

voonte wrote:

How does KDE (3.x) work without arts?

I haven't tested it yet, but I learned it shouldn't be necessary:

slycordinator wrote:

Because arts is at best not very useful (it doesn't do anything without a kernel sound driver like alsa or oss and everything it can do alsa and oss can do by themselves) and at worst it doesn't work very well anyway.

Update
This is strange. Alsa is working properly but KDE soundeffects aren working . Can this be due to the missing arts flag? Anyhow I remove the the -arts flag._________________Please add [solved] to the initial post's subject line if you feel your problem is resolved. Help answer the unanswered

Because arts is at best not very useful (it doesn't do anything without a kernel sound driver like alsa or oss and everything it can do alsa and oss can do by themselves) and at worst it doesn't work very well anyway.

Update
This is strange. Alsa is working properly but KDE soundeffects aren working . Can this be due to the missing arts flag? Anyhow I remove the the -arts flag.

Did you rebuild kde after the USE flag change? Because if you built it with USE=arts it'll be built to use arts and not use alsa directly. Or perhaps make sure you have USE=alsa. I'm not sure; personally, I had no trouble without using arts when I was using kde about a month ago and I sure don't remember doing anything fancy.

Update
This is strange. Alsa is working properly but KDE soundeffects aren working . Can this be due to the missing arts flag? Anyhow I remove the the -arts flag.

Yeah it looks like KDE System Notifications uses arts only (they call it 'KDE Sound System' in the KControl i suppose) and can't use alsa instead. I've not noticed it because I turn off all system sounds anyway... The only workaround I found is to use external player to play those sounds (yay for KDE's configurability) in KControl --> Sound & Multimedia --> System Notifications --> Player Settings (like ogg123 or mplayer). But this is of course sub-optimal...